The pros and cons of running containers on AKS

As with every technology in this book, there are good things and there are constraints that you need to take into account. Once again, we have documented these as pros and cons.

Pros

There are quite a few pros with AKS. Let’s look at them now.

Managed control plane

One of the biggest pros, if not the biggest, is the managed control plane that comes with AKS. Where it can take a considerable amount of time to deploy a vanilla Kubernetes cluster on your self-managed virtual machines, on Microsoft Azure, all that complexity is abstracted away; you get all of it managed and out of the box.

And that is just for the Deployment. Managing the cluster becomes significantly easier with AKS. We don’t have to deal with managing and updating the local etcd store, the certificates, or the agents (kubenet and kubelet). Yes, we still need to press the buttons to move to a new version of AKS, but once those buttons are pressed...